In an interview with MSPmentor, Vallee concedes it’s too early to say where the managed services market will take Avnet.

Here’s more perspective from Vallee.

August 2008 marked Vallee’s 10th year as CEO of Avnet, and 31st year with the company. We spoke about a range of topics during our discussion earlier this week. And we’ll be sharing more thoughts from Vallee on MSPmentor and its sister site, The VAR Guy, over the next few days.

Managed Services: Finding the Right Niche

In recent months, Avnet has been promoting several enhancements to its OneTech managed services strategy.

Still, Vallee concedes, these are the “early days for us” in the MSP industry.

“We have quite a significant IT operation,” says Vallee. But that doesn’t mean Avnet wants to compete against big integrators, big IT service providers and big cloud services like Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Instead, says Vallee, Avnet started exploring how to “scale our IT resources to accelerate the success of our partners. So we’re hosting services that our partners are reselling. We started with server and application hosting. Now we’re evolving into storage hosting and we’ll see where the market takes us.”

Dollars and Cents

So how is Avnet OneTech performing, and where is it heading next?

Vallee offers this candid perspective:

“It’s too early to say where the market will take us. We’re getting reasonably good traction [with OneTech managed services], but it’s a very small of our revenue stream.”

Avnet isn’t the only distributor with a managed service strategy. Other distributor-driven options include:

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